Life on Mars

by Lori McNulty

  I listen to Pastor Sherman lead the young reverend through our town’s dusty facts. A decade of drought. Farmers forced to sell their cattle or face a shortage of feed grain.

  “No good, sir,” he intones, his cracked lower lip trembling. Marcus always referred to the pastor as Bog Man, a repository of dead things.

  Then the herd erupts. Mrs. Dodd and Joannie Peen with their “Praise the Lord” and “Pass the Judgment,” just one everlasting wail from the Pentecostals.

  “There’s tuna and pickle here, Reverend, and cream cheese,” Joannie chirps, pointing to her array of pinwheel sandwiches set out on the folding table.

  “Fine, ladies. Just splendid. Thank you. We came straight through. Didn’t stop to eat for a good five hundred miles,” the reverend says as he smooths a dovetail of fine auburn hair along his nape, where a white stripe fringes his hairline, betraying the golden edge of a Utah tan. He drops two ham-and-cheese pinwheels on his paper plate.

  “Always nice to see a caring Christian woman.” The reverend turns, extending his smooth hand to me.

  “I see you’ve met the Widow Thérèse.” Miss Morris steps in between us. She hated Marcus. Blamed him, like all the rest. When Marcus died, she showed up at our house with a half-eaten casserole. Told me to repent, told me to pray. Told Zane that Marcus had met an early grave because his father would not summon the Lord’s faith. Closed casket. And there she was yelling about the blessed Father. Not the one who came up bloated and raw.

  “Blessed friends,” the reverend turns from Miss Morris to address the crowd, “we hope you all come out to the Meeting tomorrow. And please bring your neighbours!”

  Then he lays his hands on the pastor’s sloped shoulders and, in his impassioned bass voice, promises the Meeting will change things.

  They say change comes along when you give up fighting or are humming along, thinking you’re doing just fine. Sometimes it comes towing an old utility trailer. Marcus cruised into my life in a rusted half-ton truck, his slate-blue eyes swallowing light. I was a seventeen-year-old mess of a girl pouring coffee in a highway truck stop outside of Calgary, owned by Edna Mildar whose famous bloody roast beef dinner attracted folks far and wide. Marcus ordered fried liver and bacon with fries, not once bothering to pick up his knife. I could tell by the state of his split, shorn heels, his leather boots were older than me. I winked, refilling his water glass for the third time. He kept his head down and tucked into his meat.

  There are men who move mountains. Men who conquer the world, soil clinging to their heels. Marcus was a broken bridge over a spent creek. He held the hum of misery in his hands. In time, he told me terrible things. His father hauling him and his younger brother out into the woods with a length of chain. Each of them bent over a fallen tree, their bottoms parted to the wind to pay for some imagined mischief. Marcus remembered the dog barking at his father’s heels. Without a penny in their pockets, the two young teens would pack up one morning and make their way to the foothills, carrying nothing but two hard-framed suitcases with brass fasteners. Marcus remembered his weeping mother had pitched in sweaters, dirty jeans, and all the folded money she kept hidden in the toe of her heavy wool socks. Two brass clicks, and off they went into the pitch-black. I knew wherever Marcus had begun in this world, there were surely fields of fire. Yet his heart song was rapture. So pure he kept it knotted in a burlap sack he had pitched to the river bottom. In his wind-bitten skin, his coarse, sun-flecked beauty, I hoped to find something of my own.

  After a year of dating, Marcus agreed to move into my room, with its sagging double bed and metal desk set beneath a small window overlooking a downtown Calgary intersection. When we learned our Zane was on the way, I closed my eyes, pointed to a tiny dot on the map, some nowhere cow town where Marcus and I would endure eight years of small-town intrusion. He lasted longer than most who come to Vermouth. Haven’t you heard? The sun here is vile and sharp as teeth. And the winters will cut a path clean through you.

  Vermouth County was named after farmer Vern Clempt, whose people had settled the Bow region in 1897. Running south along the river, the land here is wide and flat, drawing farmers from the Ukraine, from England and France, cattle-and plow-born men, too root-bound to catch the oil fever that later gutted so many southern Alberta towns. Folks here put them together — Vern, the river mouth — and clapped their hands. That’s when the river began rising.

  Starting off as an icy-cold drip in the Wapta icefield, the Bow River begins its long journey high in the Rocky Mountains. Along the river’s mid-section, the current cuts through rolling foothills and grain fields, stitched together by crisscrossing bridges. Marcus and I settled on the East Side, our tiny white clapboard house screened by scrub brush and old poplars. Vermouth was seventeen hundred strong, with neighbours close enough to know your business, tough enough to lend a hand with harvest. We told folks we had married in Saskatchewan where my parents owned a row-crop farm. We invented a wedding with a ribbon-wrapped carrot bouquet. When pale-faced Zane arrived that first year, we called him Cauliflower Boy, this new life hidden beneath a leafy cover of lies.

  After Zane, and over time, I poured some of my own stories into Marcus.

  In a faith-forged south Saskatchewan town, whispers of a girl gone wrong. A child born, long before Zane. Not without the young girl’s hunger. Not by some wicked stranger. She acted on her lust for a man, not a mere boy. Don’t you know? Desire in a girl leaves the world in a constantly agitated state. So that girl’s got no choice. Give up what is stirring inside and face the future alone. Nothing left for her at home but the prison house they’ll build her out of hatred and shame. So the baby is born six weeks premature, given another’s name, and raised in another home. And that young girl makes her way to Alberta without the smudge of shame on her lips.

  Listen. Hear me now. Secrets don’t get their power because of something hidden away. They’re things we treasure so dearly they’re deep seductions. Maybe it’s our righteous sense of truth, or the faith we cling to at night and keep polishing smooth as a river stone. The secret is a temptress walking and breathing in us. Hold her too tight, and she’ll become your undoing.

  After meeting Marcus, my past dissolved in me like the silt-bottomed Bow shedding its glacial sweep into the roaring South Saskatchewan. He did not speak to me of angels. Did not ask me to crawl on my knees before the crumbling Gates. Told me in his gruff tone, Don’t surrender to His mighty hand. Sink your own hands into the minerals and mud. No sacrifice but the labour of soil and seed.

  Marcus was my blood lamb, meant to wash me clean. They say the Lord only punishes those he welcomes as his children. But if God disciplines us on earth, doesn’t that mean we’re legitimate? Children of mercy? Children of vengeance? Listen deep and wide; maybe you’ll hear the truth thundering in your ears. Are you the wicked repentant or remorseless sinner? Until Marcus passed, I didn’t know.

  Thirty-two of the faithful arrive for Meeting Day One. Most are curious, like Miss Morris who takes a whiff of the ammonia-slicked basement floor and topples back on her folding chair. We right her, she’s fine, enough to send a bitter glance my way. The room holds over a hundred, so I pass the time counting the empty seats between me and salvation. Seventeen. Empty, then saint, saint, empty, sinner, saint, empty. Zane is wool-bound in his brown-checked suit. He’s Marcus, right down to his brooding eyes. What would Marcus say, seeing his boy now? So eager to restore the promise of glory his father left behind.

  A live microphone arcs out from an altar that stands mid-room. You can hear the Grayson twins wheeze all the way to the back row; they tug on twisty blue-grey beards, making deep nests with their fingers. A billowing navy-blue velvet curtain hangs from three sturdy metal poles the city suits have set up and pushed forward a few feet from the back wall. The makeshift room, reserved for the lost-at-large, is a soft blue tide against the bleak prairie grey. We sit in silence, adrift on a ship of fools.

  Soon gospel notes drown the room in cherry tones —
sweet, lustrous sounds streaming from two walnut speakers positioned atop tall black pillars set on either side of the room. The sour, paper-faced congregation begins to clap tentatively as if suffering a singalong. I finger-count the paydays in December. As the lights dim, the reverend strides down centre aisle, his copper face lit by a single spotlight. His smile nearly sacred.

  He holds his arms out, ready to carry a great burden. “Bring me your sinners.”

  He glares at Zane, me, Miss Morris, Joanie Peen, the Graysons.

  “Are you a sinner?” he shouts. His eyes stray across every damned face.

  From the back comes a sound like a series of rumbling claps you hear before lightning. Windows rattle. A purse drops from a nervous lap. Zane squeezes my hand. We turn to look out the frosted basement window, expecting to spot a semi-trailer rumbling in off the highway. But the road is clear.

  The reverend slips his right arm inside his charcoal-grey blazer.

  “Dear God, the man’s having a stroke,” Miss Morris gasps, leaping to her feet.

  The reverend’s face turns the colour of blanched wheat. When he extracts his hand, an orange flame seems to burst from his palm.

  “Fire!” We all point to Reverend Evan Nack’s hand as he staggers forward and, with a swooping arc, pitches the flame out.

  “Here,” he says, clean palm facing outward, “is the Devil we cast out today.”

  Zane won’t release my hand. I don’t want him to. It’s a conjurer’s trick, I think, glaring at the man.

  “What’s an unbeliever, you ask.” The reverend scans our harried faces, then turns away toward the blue-velvet prayer room. “An unbeliever is the Devil’s possession.”

  Emerging from behind the curtains at the back of the room, a man shields his face from the spotlight. His eyes lift toward us. Facing him, we all lean forward in our seats. His name slips from our lips.

  “Daryl? Is that Daryl Jane?” we whisper, as the poor man takes a few steps toward us, finally drops to his hands and knees in the front of the room.

  “This decade has been your trial,” the reverend says, gesturing at Daryl, whose farm was the first to fail. “The hard years have sewn despair into your hearts. Left you cursing your shrivelled crops and calling names.” He pauses, places a hand on Daryl’s head. “It’s time to welcome the Holy Spirit back in.”

  The reverend’s supporters take Daryl by the arms, gently guide him back behind the blue-velvet curtains into what they’re calling a prayer room. The teary, bewildered crowd rises to their feet. Drowning in a resounding sea of amen, I pull Zane off his chair and dart out the church doors.

  Adrift between sorrow and sleep that night, Marcus appears in a purple dawn. He leans next to me, whispering, “The Lord isn’t here to heal you. He’s a menace with a master plot. You’ve got to purge the enemy, or pay for his crimes.”

  Until I met Marcus, I was half done, like a foam cake bent on not rising, though you whip, you whip. Wild thoughts raced, wires snapped in my brain. Marcus was my power outage. Poof. He came in and all the noise went out of my head. Yet a current ran through his fingers where he held me. The man would vibrate just sitting there. He was handsome and grim and tender and over six feet tall. His refusal to get involved in local politics and gossip rankled some. But they needed him. He could fix anything with an engine: combines, hay balers, swathers, crop dryers, grain augers, manure spreaders. He could overhaul and fix them up without a bit of training. Farmers called on him day and night. Especially during harvest. Mostly he kept to himself, didn’t much like when the work kept him indoors.

  One day when I came home from my shift at the co-op grocery, I found Marcus alone at the table. His knuckles and the skin of his palm had been ripped raw. Torque wrench spattered with blood next to him. He was staring ahead when I drew near. Bolt blocked, he said, his hands shaking. Blood stippled the chair, trailed across the kitchen floor. His fingers were twitching, a terrible knee-jiggle. I tried to hold his leg still while I worked the wound, his eyes drifting so far away I couldn’t call him back. Next day I learned he had been a foot away when a hired man’s fingers were crushed by an auger blade. Marcus couldn’t untangle the mess. It left something bleak and barren in his heart. That was the way it was with Marcus. Some days he just lost the thread.

  Zane pitches a fit the next morning, until I agree to take him back to the Meeting. Redemption is luring him out to sea, I can smell it.

  “Okay, okay,” I say, finally, “but stay close to me.” Damned if I let him stray, I think.

  Sixty-one file into the church basement on Day Two. The reverend calls sinners to come forth. No body rises. No soul divides. Then Mavella hobbles forth with her walker, bony fingers curled around its sheepskin handles. She fancies herself as sin’s sanitizer, one of the town’s Sunday best. First in line for prayer, last to claim penance, her thoughts are calmed only by communion with her Lord.

  She places one tentative hand on the reverend’s waist. He kneels down, looks at her as if she’s just appeared to him in a painted Sistine Chapel sky. Lightly, he touches her sleeve.

  “You want to heal, but are you ready to hear? Are you ready to drive the Devil back?”

  “My Spirit. My Saviour.” She can’t recite a recipe, yet here she is summoning the sacred in velvet tones.

  The reverend wedges her face between his hands.

  “My Lord. My Life.” Mavella’s lost in an incantatory rhythm. She crouches, impossibly, joining the reverend on bended knee. It’s only a bad hip, but still — “Praise Him! Save her!” the crowd chants.

  Wake up! I want to say, as he pushes her head back. Look out. He’s the lion tamer with his terrible whip.

  The reverend turns his gaze toward us.

  “The Spirit is in you,” he says, then lets his head fall while Mavella whimpers.

  “And the Devil is in you, too.”

  When Mavella returns to her unsteady feet, the reverend collapses.

  Stranded in a sea of flailing arms, I hear the voice.

  “Are you listening? Can you hear?” Marcus commands. “If the Lord is a fisherman, he’s strictly a catch-and-release man. Soon as he grabs hold of you, he’ll let go.”

  Was it ice on the roof, or tree branches moaning at dawn? The signs of a harsh winter are easy to spot. Bees build their hives higher in the trees, apple skins are tough, corn husks grow thicker than a large man’s bicep. Folks say Marcus brought eternal desert to the town the way he died. Left us awash in sin.

  None of this I tell the Reverend Evan Nack when I reluctantly agree to meet him in the lobby of the Travelodge. Double-cream coffees, matching plaid recliners, a frosted dish of pillow-shaped mints between us. The reverend presses my hand into his.

  I pull it away. “I don’t want you filling my boy’s head with drivel, you hear me? No one brought you here to peddle false hope and promised lands. You should take that sack of Bibles and go home.”

  He pushes the tissue box toward me, folding his hands in his lap. “When a man dies without calling the faith to him…” the reverend begins quietly.

  “You don’t know anything about Marcus,” I reply curtly.

  He begins again. “Matthew says make a tree good, and its fruit will be good. Make a tree bad, and its fruit will be bad, for a tree is recognized by its fruit.”

  “Are you saying Zane is some kind of spoiled fruit? Marcus was some rotting tree? Had no right to seed?”

  The reverend leans away from me like a boy shunned.

  I explain to him how Mrs. Dodd showed up with her Bible and basket of bruised peaches when Marcus died. Miss Morris arrived with her blasphemy and half-eaten casserole. And me, left alone, my boy to raise, not enough money to make the mortgage.

  “Don’t lay your piety at my table, reverend. And don’t go telling me these pilgrims in town are making progress.”

  The reverend rises to his feet, removes the jacket he proceeds to fold neatly across his lap. “You are absolutely right. You were left with your brave heart, yo
ur boy,” he says, bending toward me. “Kindness. That’s all you needed.”

  His eyes are flecked green, seem to bore breath from me. Hold the fear, his gaze seems to say, as my hand goes limp in his palm. Find the shore.

  And I can see to the bottom of the Bow, river rock at my heels, a steady stream in my ears. Cool waters lashing my hips.

  “Marcus was far away from his faith,” the reverend says in a quiet tone. “Separated from Him by his thoughts and deeds.”

  Separate, yes, but Marcus could see, I think. He is the Word.

  Day Three. Zane wails and stomps and bargains with me, so I finally agree to return to church. Meeting news has spread through town. More than just farmers’ wives now. Working men from the Keegster Dairy shuffle in, managers from the feed co-op over in the next town show up, stomping the cold from their feet. Zane and I settle in the third row. The Graysons shift over to make room.

  Zane tugs on his earlobe when the reverend tells us the trumpet is beginning to sound. The reverend cups a hand to his ear for a long minute.

  “Who among you has chosen to do the Devil’s work? Examine yourselves now,” the reverend implores.

  An old rancher from Wellpley shouts back, “It’s the Devil that done us wrong! You see any rain on the horizon, reverend? Got any hay we can harvest? Go ahead and look into your crystal ball. We’ll wait.”

  Evan Nack walks up to the rancher, squares himself to the other man’s barrel chest. Without a word, he lays a hand firmly on the back of the man’s neck. The rancher shakes him off and jumps to his feet.

  “Think you can see the horizon?” he asks the man. “Not with your fear. Not with your curses and complaints.” The reverend begins to sway slightly on his heels. “What is seen is temporary,” he says. “What is unseen, eternal. Fix your eyes on what is unseen,” he pronounces, facing the crowd, raising his eyes high above our shoulders so our heads tilt up and back when he conjures moist fields, the soil rich between our fingers. Fine beef-cattle fences, and calves, their bellies heavy with feed, at the trough. Row crops doing their storm sashay before a flash afternoon shower.